The Price of Faith

Disclaimer:
All the opinions expressed in this article are the opinions of Dr. Seshadri
Kumar alone and should not be construed to mean the opinions of any other
person or organization, unless explicitly stated otherwise in the article.

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Abstract

Our faith in various aspects
of the society we live in is constantly being challenged. Our faith that the
air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat is safe; that our
streets are safe for our women and children; that our representatives in
government can be trusted; that our infrastructure is safe; and many other
aspects of life – is sorely tested each time we encounter a betrayal of that
faith. But rather than conclude that one cannot believe in anyone or anything,
we must realize that it is important to be able to believe, and that there is a
price to be paid if we must continue to have faith, and that price is one of
constant vigilance and persistence by the citizenry in demanding openness and
transparency, both from public and private organizations.

Faith.

·It is what we have every day when we take the
elevator from our flat to the ground level in order to walk out of our home –
faith that the elevator will not snap and send us to a horrible death by
crushing.

·It is what we have when we take a train to go to
another town or city – faith that the train will not have an accident by a
collision or derailment and result in us being killed or amputated.

·It is what we have when open a bottle of milk
and drink it – faith that the white liquid we are drinking is pure milk and not
adulterated, which can kill or injure us.

·It is what we have when we send our children to
a school – faith that our children will be well-treated and not sexually
molested.

·It is what we have when we open the tap and
drink the water from it (at least in developed countries; in India you wouldn’t
dare) – faith that the water is not contaminated with heavy metals or other
pollutants.

·It is what we have when we open the window and
breathe in the air – faith that the air is not polluted with air-borne
chemicals from industrial pollution that can cause asthma, wheezing, and
allergies.

·It is what millions of Indians have daily when
they have a dip in the sacred river Ganga – faith that the river will cleanse
their sins and not make them ill because of dangerous bacteria that enter the
river because of raw, untreated sewage that is discharged into the river
through its entire course.

·It is what we have when we pick up the phone and
have a long conversation with a friend or a loved one – faith that the
conversation we are having is indeed private; that no one else is snooping on
our private chat.

But Repeatedly, Our Faith in These
and a Thousand Other Things is Tested.

This is just a sample of the thousands of betrayals one
could list – betrayals of the faith that people reposed in various authorities that
those who were sworn or law-bound to protect their safety and privacy.

Who is Ultimately Responsible for This?

It goes without saying that the criminals who raped the
6-year old in Bangalore should be brought to justice and meted out the severest
penalty possible; that the city authorities along the banks of the Ganga who
allow it to be polluted with raw sewage and industrial contaminants should be
harshly penalized; that those who adulterate milk with melamine should spend
the rest of their lives in prison for the deaths they have caused; that the
authorities who allow the air in Delhi to be so polluted, whether by vehicular
or industrial pollution, should be taken to task; that the Indian railways
officials who were responsible for their negligence which led to the train
accident in Gorakhpur should be strictly punished; and that the representatives
of the American people who authorized the spying on their own people should be
punished by the people.

But there is an even more fundamental question that these
bring about – why did the breach of faith occur in the first place?

It occurred because we were too willing to have blind faith
in the institutions that failed us.

And that brings us to the moral of this article: that there is no place for blind faith in a
rational society – that there is a price to be paid for faith – and that price is
the constant vigilance of the citizenry.

The breaches of faith occurred because we, the citizens, were not vigilant in
preventing these crimes from happening. They occurred because we were not careful
enough to see that procedures were not being properly followed, that guidelines were being flouted, and that crimes were not being monitored.

Yes, my friends, it is we
who are ultimately responsible.

The
criminals who are responsible for each of the crimes listed above are responsible
for having committed these crimes and should be as strictly punished as the
laws allow. But we, the citizens, are responsible for allowing the crimes to
happen in the first place.

Where Have Citizens Failed?

We
have failed in being vigilant, in demanding transparency and accountability. A
democracy truly functions as a representative government of the people only
when there is complete transparency; when citizens organize to demand what they
want; and when representatives are accountable to their constituents.

It
is fashionable to flagellate others for failing their duty – for example, to
blame politicians for not being responsive to the needs of their voters. But
have we done our duty as the citizens?
Let us take each of the incidents that I have listed above.

·In the case of the Bangalore school where the six-year old
child was raped, how many parents knew about the staff that the school had
employed? Were there any background or police checks performed on these gym
instructors? If so, were they publicly posted on an internet website that the
parents had access to? Why are these and all facts about the school not openly
available to the consumers of the school, i.e., the parents? The reason is that
at present, private schools hold an advantage over parents – and this is
because there is an artificial shortage in the number of schools. The root causes
of all these problems are the restrictive
regulations on opening schools. Ideally, a high demand for private schools
would, in a free economy, be met by a rise in private schools until supply and
demand are matched. But because of unreasonable controls that are in place to
benefit the already-present private players, the number of schools is not
enough for the demand for them. As a result, private schools act in an
insufferably arrogant way, and do not believe that they need to be accountable
and transparent to their customers, viz., the parents.

So, in this case, the citizens have failed both in demanding that their
representatives open up private schooling to more players as well as in
demanding openness and transparency from the school. The parents should be able
to view the records and background of every employee of the school on the
school’s webpage, including their backgrounds and the results of police and
background verification checks on them. If this had been done, there would have
been a higher chance of preventing the rape from happening.

·The waters of the Ganga are incredibly polluted; yet how many
citizens have taken on any activist role and demanded the clean-up of the river?
How many citizens of Banaras or Allahabad have demanded that untreated sewage
or corpses not be simply dumped into the river – actions that greatly increase
the concentration of pathogens in the river water? How many citizens of Kanpur
are concerned about the toxic effluents from the leather tanneries in Kanpur
that make their way into the Ganga without treatment?

The problem with the Indian citizen is that he or she has become completely
apathetic and selfish, and has no concept of civic responsibility. As long as
the sewage is removed from my flat, why care what happens to it? But oh, the
Ganga should be clean. The two expectations are incongruent.

·China is a totalitarian state, and so one cannot hold its
citizens to the same standard that one can hold citizens of democratic countries.
But the Chinese example of milk adulteration is something people everywhere can
relate to. How many of us demand that suppliers of foodstuffs give a detailed
account of what is in the foodstuffs? In western countries, every ingredient of
a product is listed on the package. There is no such requirement in India. Milk
suppliers have no obligation to offer a minimum specific gravity or a
certificate of quality to their customers. Most customers do not even demand
any such thing from their suppliers. Is there any surprise that adulteration
occurs?

·PM2.5 is a designation of particulate matter emissions that
are below 2.5 micrometers in diameter. These particles can get into
our lungs and cause cancers. The source of this pollution is burning, and
this can come from household burning of firewood or cowdung, or automobile emissions
from diesel automobiles. This can be controlled by mandating better emission
control devices on automobiles, especially the highly-polluting trucks that dot
the Indian landscape, and by improving electrification in New Delhi in the
winter so that people do not resort to polluting fuels such as firewood or
cowdung.

Have citizens of Delhi ever banded together in a movement to demand tightening
of air quality norms for automobiles? How many trucks are plying, either in
Delhi or elsewhere in the country, that are openly flouting the existing Bharat
IV pollution norms? I see trucks, taxis, and auto rickshaws everywhere in the
country that clearly violate pollution norms – many times you see black smoke coming from the exhaust
pipes of these vehicles. Yet have citizens demanded better enforcement of
existing emission laws? Have they ever demanded widening of the electrification
net in the capital so that people are not forced to use firewood or cowdung for
their heating needs in the winter? The answer is definitely no.

·Railway
accidents are a routine event in India. Every time an accident happens, the
media is full of discussion as to why the accident happened. But beyond the
routine blame game, few citizens ponder deeply about why these accidents
happen. Yes, many incidents are the result of negligence; but more often than
that, the causes of accidents are that there is not enough money in the
railways for routine maintenance. The wear on the tracks, on the bogeys, the
engines, and the stations is very significant, and the only way to avoid accidents
is to have an aggressive program of maintenance and better-trained personnel so
that human error occurs less frequently. What happens, on the contrary, is that
engines, bogeys, and tracks that have outlived their lives continue to be in
service because there is no money to replace them. Yet, the citizens of India
are always opposed to ANY increases in fare hikes because they view the fare
hikes not as a necessary adjustment to account for inflation but as an “anti-people”
move.

The only way to stop this is to have a completely transparent operation of the
Indian railways, so that any Indian can view on the internet the situation with
any engine, track or bogey, and see when the maintenance was due and when it
was actually done. Railway budgets should not be based on the wisdom of some
railway minister, but on the situation on the ground. A demand for money for
running the railways should be made on the basis of this publicly available
information so that the demand is seen in objective terms – as a need for
monetary allocation for necessary running of the railways rather than an
arbitrary decision by a government. Once such a system exists, if people
disapprove of a hike for maintenance, the government can clearly say that this
accident occurred because the people did not approve a fare hike for a certain
segment.

We have failed in not demanding transparency in the running of government
utilities such as the railways.

·The 2013 American
government spying scandal shocked both Americans and the rest of the world.
Yet how many Americans even knew about the fact that this program started in 2007 under
the leadership of President George W. Bush, and was supported by both
Republicans and Democrats? The spying that occurred was a direct result of this
publicly-announced program. It was ostensibly created only to spy on those
communications that related to Americans’ correspondence with foreigners, yet
the safeguards were so weak that the act could easily be abused to spy on one and
all. Yet for six years no one was the least worried about any of this, until Edward Snowden revealed
to the world the extent of US spying.

True, the US government has to bear the blame of committing the crime of invasion
of privacy, but it was the lack of diligence of the American people that
allowed it to violate the Fourth
Amendment under the guise of legality. It is the failure of the American
people as a whole that allowed the government to abuse its power.

·Vapi being a horribly polluted town is very well-known in
Maharashtra and Gujarat. My father, who was a professor of Organic Chemistry,
had many past students who worked in the chemical factories in Vapi. They would
tell us of dogs which were dyed green, blue and yellow because they had
wallowed in the effluent from dyestuff companies which would simply dump their
failed batches of dyes out in the open.

Why isn’t something being done about this? How are environmental clearances
being given to companies like these? Why are citizens not demanding more
transparency in the functioning of chemical and other companies? All companies are entitled to secrecy when it
comes to trade secrets, but their environmental record should be out in the
open. Every clearance that is given to a chemical company should be out in the
public domain, along with the values of the effluents that are found to be
detected in their effluent streams, so that any concerned citizen can take a
sample downstream of the plant himself and get it analyzed at any lab and
verify whether or not the plant meets environmental standards.

If Vapi had the distinction of being the world’s most polluted place in 2007,
it is because its citizens never demanded transparency. They never demanded
that the industries prove that their effluents meet standards, and they turned
a blind eye to the corruption of the environment ministry by the chemical
industry.

What Can We Do To Change the
Situation?

The
only way to change the situation so that one can continue to believe in the
water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the schools we trust our
kids with, the trains and planes we entrust our lives with, the hospitals which
we hope will save our lives rather than take them, and hundreds of other
things, is for citizens to be more vigilant.

We need to demand
transparency in every aspect of life, from both public as well as private
enterprises.

Citizens
of every government need to demand COMPLETE transparency and accountability
from their governments. With the exception of defense-related matters, which
need to be kept confidential in order to protect the nation from external
enemies, EVERY transaction of the government should be publicly displayed on an
internet website for the public to view. Notes of every ministry and cabinet
meeting should be publicly displayed on websites, as well as every bill passed
in parliament and notes of every meeting between legislators and the executive
branch, except when such disclosure would compromise national security. While this
would require a lot of digital storage, disk space is today very cheap – a 1 TB
hard drive is available for a mere Rs. 5000; and internet access is widespread.
There should be nothing to prevent this solution from being implemented except
the will of the government. No government, of course, would want all its
actions to be open to the public; however, there is no valid logical or moral
objection; the representatives are OUR representatives; their duty is to report
to us; and so they have no business keeping things secret, unless making them
public would endanger national security. To make this happen, citizens have to
unite and agitate (more on this later.)

Private
enterprises have no duty to expose their affairs to the public, except to the
extent that their activities affect the public. In particular, trade secrets
and competitive intelligence need to be protected because the profitability of
private enterprise depends on it. However, environmental compliance should
very much be in the public domain.The
public has a right to know what materials a company makes or trades in, what
the risks of storage of any particular material is, and what effluents are
being emitted into the environment by the company. A fertilizer company, for
instance, owes it to the community to tell them what quantities of ammonium
nitrate are being stored on its facility, because ammonium nitrate is also a
powerful explosive and can cause a huge disaster, as
happened in West, Texas, in 2013. The public has a right to know the
precise details of the claimed effluents released by a company into a water
body because the water body is used by all. It is NOT ENOUGH TO SUBMIT THIS TO
A GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT AGENCY, as the government agency can be corrupted. Not
only government inspectors, but any member of the public should have a right to
inspect the effluents of any manufacturing facility – if necessary, to
challenge the public statements from the company (which should be displayed on
a publicly accessible website) as to the amount of environmental contaminants
released by the company.

Similarly,
agencies such as food manufacturers and distributors have a responsibility to
ensure that the quality of their foodstuffs is verifiable and the processes
they employ are transparent so that customers know what they are getting. Schools
and other organizations that take charge of our children, the weakest members
of our society, should be forced to openly reveal both the qualifications as
well as criminal antecedents of every one of their employees to their
customers.

Manufacturers
of cosmetics, toothpastes, insecticides, clothing, shoes, and other consumer
items must reveal to the consumer public what chemical constituents go into
their products (they need not reveal the exact formulation – this way they can
protect their trade secrets) so that the public knows what it consumes. These
are matters too important for them to only reveal to a government agency. We
must take a page out of western practices, where every ingredient that goes
into a cosmetic preparation is revealed on the tube or bottle.

Citizens need to get into
the habit of becoming activists.

It
is very easy for people to live in their own bubble and pretend that they don’t
need to be concerned with what is happening around them. With many people in
India becoming more prosperous in the last 20 years because of liberalization
and the jobs that it has brought in its wake, people have become more self-absorbed,
indulging themselves in the enjoyment of sports and Bollywood (or other local language
movie flavours) in their free time. Most have no knowledge of or interest in
critical affairs of a regional or national nature – such as a river getting
polluted, vanishing mangroves, air pollution, lack of safety of women and
children, increasing crime, structural integrity of roads and bridges, or infringements
of privacy, to name just a few. But the fruits of such carelessness are easy to
see: without sufficient environmental protection, India will soon degenerate
into the horrible conditions present in some parts of China, where people do
not venture outside without a face-mask. Mumbai and Delhi still haven’t gone tothe levels of Beijing, but that may just be a decade away.

All
the items mentioned in the previous section, viz., on demanding transparency,
cannot be achieved without a struggle. Manufacturers will do their best to
oppose these demands, and unless citizens stand united and demand these
disclosures, these will not happen. Politicians will not want to disclose
everything they discuss, for the simple reason that they often discuss
unethical things, but we must hold their feet to the fire and ensure that they
comply with these demands.

Concluding Thoughts

We take
many things for granted in life – things that we think should be fine but are
not. We go with blind faith out into the world, thinking the world is a safe place
for us and our loved ones; that the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the
water we drink, are safe; that our government representatives always act in our
best interest. But such faith is not well-founded. But rather than descend into
cynicism and say you cannot trust anything or anyone, the lesson for us to
learn is that there is a price to be paid for having faith – it is constant
citizen vigilance and a willingness to be pro-active in demanding our rights,
in demanding openness and transparency in all aspects of life that concern us,
regardless of who we are up against. This takes hard work on the part of the
citizenry, but as the Americans say, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”
If you want to have faith in your systems, you have to work hard and be alert in
order to maintain that faith.

There
are some who believe that others will do the hard work for them – that if they
only elect that one great leader, he will take care of all their concerns. To
be specific, in the recent elections that were concluded in India, Mr. Narendra
Modi of the BJP led his party to an impressive win. The BJP campaign was
focused solely around Mr. Modi and his achievements, and generally sought to
convey the message that Mr. Modi was a wise and decisive leader who knew best.
Even if that were true, no man can speak for another, and Mr. Modi’s priorities
for India will likely be quite different from yours or mine, as he just proved
with his budget. So to imagine that the ills of the world will simply vanish because
of the election of a supposed superman is nothing but sheer folly. One cannot
abdicate personal responsibility for changing the world that one is unhappy
with simply by hoping that someone else will solve his problems for him.